50 years ago in Expo history: A 30-foot-long Canadian Mountie hat made of videotape

Canadian artist Evelyn Roth installed a spectacular work of art atop a portion of Expo ’74’s Folklife Festival: a 30-foot long Canadian Mountie hat, made out of videotape.

Videotape?

Yes, she clearly took the Expo’s environmental theme seriously and recycled a mile of old videotape into a gigantic piece of art. She and an assistant took a week to knit the hat. She was the resident artist at the B.C. Pavilion and was also helping children knit their own – much smaller – hats.

In other Expo news, the German-Austrian musical tradition was on display at the North Pacific Sangerfest, a musical competition in association with the fair.

Beethoven’s “Im Vorübergehn” was on the program, along with works by Haydn and Strauss.

From 100 years ago: Opponents of a state initiative to ban parochial schools – an initiative aimed at Catholic schools and associated with the Ku Klux Klan – fanned out through the city in an effort to torpedo the initiative.

They were contacting people who had signed a petition in favor of putting the initiative on the ballot, and urging them to withdraw their signatures. They said that about 50% of the people who signed it did not understand what the initiative entailed, and “readily signed the counter-petition withdrawing their names.”

The Spokesman-Review noted that the Friends of Educational Freedom, the group behind the counter-petitions, was not a Catholic group, but a broad coalition including the Whitman College president, a labor leader and a rabbi. But Catholics were “aiding in the field work being done locally.”